All screenings were at the Avalon Mall Cinemas, Sunday 2pm. Prices were:
full season pass: $55.00 regular, $50.00 students and seniors;
6-Pass: $30.00 regular, $25.00 students and seniors;
single admission: $7.00 regular, $6.00 students and seniors.

September 14 Kissed (Canada 1996) 78 mins.Directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
With Molly Parker, Peter Outerbridge, Jay Brazeau, Natasha Morley.
Canadian, eh? How else to explain the unconventional plot based on a
short story by Barbara Gowdie? Kissed is Vancouver director
Stopkewich's outrageously beautiful movie about a woman who prefers
pretty dead things to the often sordid world of flesh and blood. For
such a creepy idea, Stopkewich cast the luminous Molly Parker in the
role of Sandra Larson, a young woman with an apparently normal family
life and a prepossessing nature. The young Sandra is also
hyper-sensitive to the material world, favouring furry creatures and
the smell of forest fungus to playing with Barbie. When Sandra enters
the world of adulthood she snags the perfect job in a funeral parlor.
It beats working the cash at Wal-Mart and she gets to play with her men
of choice: dead guys who never talk back. If this sounds too morbid,
rest assured that Kissed has won honours at all the major
Festivals and has been widely acclaimed as an amazing tour de
corpse: a controversial feminist film with a light and even comic
touch. Not to be missed.

September 21 Everyone Says I Love You (USA 1996) 91 mins.Directed by Woody Allen.
With Alan Alda, Drew Barrymore, Lukas Haas, Goldie Hawn, Gaby Hoffmann,
Edward Norton, Julia Roberts, Tim Roth, and many many more.
Perhaps what's most interesting about Woody Allen's career is how he
has translated his intensely private life into a wide-screen pageant,
almost always comic, but rumbling with dark undertones. Everyone
Says I Love You was made after Mia, after custody battles, after
embarrassing disclosures and exposures. That Allen would produce a
broadly cheery musical about the stabilizing value of family
relationships after such trials and humiliations says a lot about a
complicated directorial make-up and perhaps a defiantly emotional man.
Last year's MightyAphrodite signaled something
similar: the protective insularity of Manhattan, the light morality of
strangers, the foolishness of human endeavour in the face of passion,
and the good intentions of ordinary shmos. This time, Allen insists on
singing about it, and along the lines of Dennis Potter's reliance on
popular music to convey the Zeitgeist. Indeed, this time Allen turns
the whole world into a Greek chorus, or at least the charmed blocks of
the Upper West Side.

September 28 Kolya (Czech Rep./UK/France 1996) 105 mins.Directed by Jan Svêrák.
With Zdenk Svrák, Andrej Chalimon, Libue Safránková,
et al.
Last year's moving Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Kolya is the
eponymous five-year-old son of Nadezda. A young Russian woman requiring
Czech papers, Nadezda enters a phony marriage with the older Frantiek
Louka who buys a vehicle and visits his own aging mother with the money
from the deal. When Kolya's maternal grandmother who is raising him
dies, he is dumped on the unsuspecting Louka. At first the older man
and the child have nothing to say to each other; in fact, the boy
speaks no Czech and interferes in Louka's life just by showing up. But
as life proceeds, so do the two unlikely partners. That's more or less
the sketch of the story. But Kolya is also set in Prague, 1988, on the
eve of the Velvet Revolution. Everything that happens in this meltingly
wonderful film partakes of grand political events. Everyone lives on
the edge of fantastic change in the way characters simply do not in
North American movies. The great achievement of Kolya lies in its
ability to convey how history works, often without any of its central
players realizing the significance of what is going on. Irony and
artfulness work together to make this film one of the season's
highlights.

October 5 Ulee's Gold (USA 1997) 111 mins.Directed by Victor Nunez.
With Peter Fonda, Patricia Richardson, Jessica Biel, J. Kenneth Campbell.
This Sundance Festival winner centres on Ulee Jackson (Fonda), a quiet,
slow-talking beekeeper living in the wetlands of the Florida panhandle.
You might say that this character is the emblem of hard-working rural
America, embodying decency and nobility with stoic resolve in the face
of crisis. Interrupting Ulee's ritualized isolation is the appearance
of two granddaughters badly in need of his guardianship. Disturbed and
rebellious, these two young women threaten everything Ulee has
cultivated for so long. The power of this often dark and intense
melodrama lies largely in Fonda's acclaimed performance as a moral
force of authority and assurance. The once easy rider has obviously
matured into the kind of cinematic presence his always dignified father
was, the type of actor you'd happily trust to do your banking for you.
For Peter Fonda, this role may seem a long way from the seductive bike
paths of Monument Valley but when you see him as Ulee you'll recognize
how it much he is all in the family.

October 12 Shall We Dance (Japan 1997) 110 mins.
English subtitles.Directed by Masayuki Suo.
With Koji Yakusho, Tamiyo Kusakari, Naoto Takenaka.
A spectacularly popular hit in its home territory, Shall We
Dance deliberately takes its name from the ever-popular fifties
musical about a colonial babe and a follicly-challenged Persian king.
Cultural conflict in this Japanese spin on a silly tale comes not from
without, however. The pressures within modern Japanese culture are
strong enough to drive millions of alienated guys to do the strangest
things, albeit in quiet defiance of centuries of honour-bound
tradition. What happens, for instance, when a successful middle-aged
married businessman wants to break out of his Honda? In North America
he might run off with a bimbo and reinvent his hair. In Japan, he might
sneak off to ballroom- dancing lessons, the sort of activity openly
designated for losers and the overweight. The magnificently handsome
Yakusho plays the role of an awkward hoofer tirelessly transformed by
life and lessons into an Asian Fred Astaire. But the process of getting
there is at once hilarious and romantic, full of broad
chopshtick and some unforgettably funny characters. Rumoured
to have made Yoko Ono laugh.

October 19 Female Perversions (USA/Germany 1996) 113 mins.Directed by Susan Streitfield.
With Tilda Swinton, Amy Madigan, Karen Sillas, Frances Fisher,
and more.
If you are intrigued by the title you ain't heard nothin' yet.
Female Perversions, scheduled as part of the St. John's
International Women's Film and Video Festival, is about as out-there
as a narrative about feminism can be, and it's superb, maybe the most
intelligent and challenging film about female sexuality to date. Tilda
Swinton, the unconventional cross-dressing British star of the epic
Orlando, is at the troubled core of this fictional story
evolved from a Freudian-feminist study of female behavior (J. Kaplan's
Female Perversions). She plays an archetypal modern woman
named Eve, a woman in line for a judgeship in L.A. who has a rather
messy relationship with her sister. Streitfield's first feature film is
amazingly audacious, pushing the problems of contemporary womanhood to
challenging limits. Eve's 'perversion' is not just that she has
disturbing and neurotic fantasies of submission to patriarchy; she also
collides in her professional and personal life with so-called
acceptable definitions of femininity. Not only that but this film gives
new meaning to the term 'sisterly.' Forget the bargain-basement
bonding of The First Wives' Club. In Female
Perversions, we learn that sometimes a tube of lipstick is not
just a tube of lipstick.

October 26 Prisoner of the Mountains
(Kazakhstan/Russia 1996) 95 mins. English subtitles.Directed by Sergei Bodrov.
With Oleg Menshikov, Sergei Bodrov, Jr., Djemal Sikharulidze,
and others.
The spotlight director for several years at the Toronto Festival,
Bodrov is known as the most hip of contemporary Russian filmmakers. Of
course, he has a great laboratory of material with which to experiment
in his homeland. In this case he turns his eye on the absurd horrors of
the Chechen war, representing it forcefully through a human-centred
tale about a couple of Russian soldiers who are captured and brought to
a small mountain village. The village elder exploits their presence to
gain freedom for his own captured son. Typically, the two prisoners,
Sacha and Vania, come to see their captors as humans, not demons.
Bodrov's own son plays the role of Vania, lending a poignancy to this
necessary account of how stupid and wasteful war really is. The plot
may be simple but the telling is profound. Indeed, Bodrov borrowed its
premise from a 150-yr.-old tale by Tolstoy, which shows you that in
some places the battle hits just keep on coming. Shot only 300km away
from the actual fighting, The Prisoner of the Mountains
probably ought to be seen by anyone who still thinks that a divided
country is a great unifying idea.

November 2 The Ogre (Germany/France/UK 1996) 118 mins.Directed by Volker Schlöndorff.
With John Malkovich, Marianne Sägebrecht, Heino Ferch, Agnes Soral,
Armin Mueller-Stahl.
Renowned director of The Tin Drum, Swann in Love, and
The Handmaid's Tale, Schlöndorff's latest feature
explores one of his favourite themes: the haunted past of Germany.
Wisely, he does so here through the ingenious device of a fairy tale,
albeit a grotesque one in the tradition of the Grimms. The always
annoyingly talented Malkovich is the ogre Abel, a bit of an idiot who
sees horrible things happening around him but fails to understand their
significance. As a child, a strange occurrence led him to believe he
carries a special power. His destiny is marked by both history and fate
as he ends up working on Hermann Göring's estate, innocently
encouraging children to become part of the Hitler Youth. The brilliance
of The Ogre is that we see familiar events but through the
narrow eyes of this odd creature; therefore everything is at once
recognizable and distorted. Watch for the astonishing performance of
Armin Mueller-Stahl (Shine) as a Nazi general beset with
conflict.

November 9 When the Cat's Away (France 1996) 95 mins.
English subtitles.Directed by Cédric Klapisch.
With Garance Clavel, Zinedine Soualem, Renée Le Calm,
Olivier Py.
Leave it to the French to make a charming comedy about a missing cat.
Chacun cherche son chat is a winning romance about a woman
named Chloé. Her life is a bit of a mess, her job at a modeling
agency sucks, and the only man around is a gay housemate, Michel. While
on vacation, Chloé leaves her cat Gris-Gris with an eccentric
neighbour, Mademoiselle Renée. Searching for the inevitably
missing chat together, the two woman encounter a community in
Paris bound by ordinary but vivid realities. Klapisch shows a loving
and affectionate side of the city of lights, just as we like to think
about it. Many of the characters are non-actors, just ordinary people
inhabiting the magical streets of an extraordinary city. So When
the Cat's Away has a light improv feel to it that goes down
perfectly with a good white Burgundy and an early November bucket of
popcorn.

November 16 Trojan Eddie (UK/Ireland 1996) 105 mins.Directed by Gillies Mackinnon.
With Stephen Rae, Richard Harris, Sean McGinley, Brid Brennan, Aislin McGuckin,
Stuart Townsend, Brenda Gleeson.
Talented director of last year's Small Faces, Mackinnon turns
his lens on a small-town Irish salesman (Rae) who talks a good line of
blarney but doesn't do much else. He'd sell his mother from the back of
his Trojan van if he could. Life isn't easy for Eddie although he
stumbles along working for John Power (Richard Harris), a real
wheeler-dealer who possesses everything Eddie craves--that is, until
Power's young bride runs off with Eddie's assistant, leaving Power with
a rage so massive he'll kill anything in his way. But Trojan
Eddie isn't a cynical or angry film. It carries the same gripping
realism as Small Faces, but with a measure of fairy dust
thrown over everything. Rae is such a good actor that he can make even
a dull picture resonate with life. But in a picture such as this one,
he really shows off the range of his expression. Mackinnon aims
successfully at evoking the natural dynamism of Ireland's underclass,
and in Rae's fast-talking Eddie we see a whole national mythology come
into being on the screen.

November 23 Dream with the Fishes (USA 1997) 96 mins.Directed by Finn Taylor.
With David Arquette, Brad Hunt, Cathy Moriarty, Kathryn Erbe.
Shot in 26 days around San Francisco, Dream with the Fishes is
a first feature for the independently minded Finn who cut his teeth in
the theatre that had launched the careers of Robin Williams and Whoopi
Goldberg. Resolutely uncomfortable with mainstream film and the studio
system, Finn values a work's writing above all, so is not surprising
that Dream with the Fishes should seem so literary. This is a
film about a rapid life-journey taken by two offbeat men caught in a
swirl of mistaken goals. Terry (Arquette) is conservative and nervous,
a timid creature who has given up on the world. Turning to the
passive-aggressive activity of voyeurism, he decides to kill himself,
but not before buying some alcoholic fortification. At the liquor store
he bumps into Nick on whom he has spied. What results from this
encounter is an odd and decidedly wild deviation from the stressful
mediocrity of daily life. The plot takes off like a bat out of
Hollywood, madly flying off in all directions, and including a nude
bowling night with two prostitutes. Have we got your attention so far?

November 30 Chasing Amy (USA 1996) 90 mins.Directed by Kevin Smith.
With Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck.
Sharply drawn characters have thus far been Smith's strength as a
director (Clerks), and in Chasing Amy he gets them
down like nobody else's business. Affleck, a comic book creator, plays
a man in love with a woman who turns out to be a comic book artist and
a lesbian (Adams). He manages a little horizontal cha cha with her, but
then learns a few things about her he'd probably not really like to
know, forcing him into major mature-mindedness in spite of himself.
Chasing Amy has often been described as a love story about two
seemingly incompatible lovers. In the nineties, all the categories are
up for grabs and courtship is as open and confusing as today's dress
codes. It's fun to see good actors at work with a lively script about
the muddled lives of youthful longing and adult responsibilities, and
this film scores well on the nuanced-life meter. If the Brady Bunch
lived in the nineties they might have turned out like this. See
Chasing Amy and find out what this is.

December 7 When We Were Kings (USA 1996) 87 mins.Directed by Leon Gast.
With Muhammad Ali et al.
So we are taken back to Zaire. It's 1974. Muhammed Ali and George
Foreman are squaring off for the world heavyweight title, the famous
'rumble in the jungle.' Well, we have seen many great boxing movies but
never one like this, an inspired documentary that says a lot more about
the whole social order that generated such a gladiatorial exhibition in
the first place. Intelligent and often ironic commentary provided by
Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and Spike Lee punctuate the scenes of
before, during, and after the fight. It seems like only yesterday, and
it was. A slice of history, an insightful meditation on the culture of
sport, and a fascinating essay on race, When We Were Kings
offers up real-life characters in ways no mere fictional exaggeration
could ever provide. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more titanic cast
than this one. Just think about Don 'Eraserhead' King, for a moment,
and be afraid, be very afraid.